Slow down.
To this day, I hardly make a mistake without hearing my father's voice in my head.
Slow down and pay attention to what you're doing.
Now, at 34, I still make careless mistakes, only now I'm telling myself to slow down and to pay attention. But it's after the fact, and it's still not effective in preventing future errors. My father’s concern—his stress, led him to attempt to control my actions, which likely contributed more to his own anxiety than to my positive development. As COVID 19 swept the globe in 2020, I found myself the nanny to a 4 and 9 year old brother and sister. Stuck inside, and feeling a pressure not to waste anyone's time, I assumed the role of teacher, coach, therapist, and primary source of exposure to the world's diverse environment.
I recognized for truly the first time, how subtle parental controls, intended to protect, can have a tremendous impact on children's development.
Echoes from my own childhood, intended to teach the children to be careful, to not touch that, hurry up, or slow down, did little to improve current or future behavior.
And, perhaps more importantly, did nothing to help them develop autonomy
I watched as the children’s attention moved from the task at hand, to the attention of the parent. Undesirable behavior almost guaranteed attention (the true goal), while behaving well and autonomously left them feeling ignored. And so they, as I remembered doing as a child, would fall short of completing a task.
Whether they were pretending to need help or were genuinely convinced of their ineptitude was beside the point.
I knew they were capable, and it became my goal for them to know it, too.
And for them to know I knew it (positive attention for positive behavior)
So I did my best to ignore their mistakes, providing space to try again until they succeeded, or asked directly for help.
Learning to teach a child to ask for help is a complex process.
CONTROLLING STRESS: A feedback loop Often, our stress responses are triggered by minor things, Priya Basil suggests in her book, Be My Guest. I'm no stranger to adverse reactions to trivial infractions. We each make sense of, and justify our reaction when small things bother us.
We may straighten a misaligned rug, tell off a begging dog, nag a messy partner, or mum a crying child.
Our first responsibility, however, is not to right the rug, correct or appease the dog, control our child's frustration, or berate or clean up after our partner. Managing these things does not regulate our stress, nor teach preferred behavior. Rather, managing these things gives them attention, which, refractorily guarantees the reoccurrence of our stress to the stimuli.
While some people may experience these situations more intensely than others, the stimulus is not aware of, nor responsible for, our internal response to it.
And therefore, we are not responsible for changing said stimuli.
But in managing our reactions to them. Yet, we feel anxious because we struggle to coexist with difference. We struggle to adapt to change; rather than assuming responsibility over our experience, we blame unexpected and unpleasant stimuli for our discomfort. Some people do things differently, and some things are out of our control. Our perspective is not always needed. Our projection is seldom helpful. Stress and control share a very intimate and important relationship. Encountering stress is inevitable.
Learning to control our reaction to it relies on our ability to see the broader picture, recognizing and appreciating that our reaction doesn't only impact others, but also our developing levels of anxiety. Simply put, the intimate relationship between stress and control is often misinterpreted.
External stimuli--including the actions of others--that bothers us (but does not directly cause us harm) is not a permission to micromanage the situation.
If we are not personally, and negatively, effected by an external stimulus, it does not behoove us, nor is it our responsibility, to intervene. Doing so only reinforces the misconception that our unsolicited help (aka intervention) is needed. And adds to our perceived responsibilities.
It is not our job to control the external factor, but our reaction to it.
I touched on this concept when I wrote about the car horn.
In other words, we're projecting.
PEOPLE AREN'T PROJECTS: Impressions are for blank walls
When our reaction to stress negatively effects others, we're no longer managing our stress, but projecting our expressions of stress, doubt, and distrust for another's autonomy. As I learned this, practicing to monitor my projections on the children I worked with, I saw that my urge to project began to fade. And as my projections faded, not only did the children’s confidence rise, but my ego fell.
EARNING TRUST: Confidence, Respect, and Autonomy
I stopped calling myself their nanny, stepped away from the role and their family, and began working with other children, families, communities, and spaces.
And found myself at the crossroad of the childhood home and the "real" world. To this day I hear my father's voice in my head. "Slow down and pay attention." Only now, it's comforting rather than critical. I'm finally able to hear his message as he intended it: A reminder that if I just slow down and pay attention, I'll make fewer mistakes, learn something valuable, and inevitably grow as a person.
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